AI Backend Engineer

We are looking for a Backend Engineer who builds with AI at the centre of their craft 6 not as a novelty, but as a primary tool that shapes how they design, write, review, and ship code. If you ve already integrated Claude Code, agentic coding tools, and MCP servers deeply into your day-to-day, and you have opinions about how to do it well, we want to talk.

You ll join a growing business with real engineering problems: a cloud-based property and content management platform with 11 integrations and more on the way, plus a new Booking & Request Management Platform with real-time data and predictive intelligence features. Your job is to ship meaningful backend work 6 fast 6 and to bring the rest of the engineering team along with you on AI-augmented practices.

We are language-agnostic. Our current stack is PHP (Symfony) and Node.js, but we ll happily take a strong engineer from Python, Go, Java, C#, Ruby, or elsewhere who can move quickly between languages 6 especially with AI tooling at their side. The bar is engineering judgement and AI fluency, not a specific language on your CV.

This role is open to EMEA based candidates.

Key Responsibilities

• AI-First Development: Lead by example in using Claude Code and agentic tooling for real production work. Establish patterns the team can follow.
• Agent Configuration & MCP: Build and maintain agent instruction files, custom commands/slash-commands, sub-agents, and MCP server integrations that make AI tooling genuinely useful on our codebase.
• AI Workflow Design: Define how AI-generated code enters our repos 6 review standards, test expectations, security checks, and the guardrails around it.
• Backend Engineering: Ship real backend features and services. AI accelerates the work; it doesn t replace the engineering.
• Code Quality & Review: Set the bar for what good looks like in an AI-augmented codebase.
• Peer-review human and AI-authored code with equal scrutiny.
• Team Enablement: Upskill other engineers in AI tooling 6 share patterns, write internal guides, run sessions.
• Collaboration: Partner with product, frontend, DevOps, and QA to align technology with business goals.

Requirements

• Backend Development: 4+ years of commercial backend experience in any modern backend language (PHP, Node.js/TypeScript, Python, Go, Java, C#, Ruby, etc.).
• Deep AI Tooling Experience: Hands-on, demonstrable use of Claude Code, Cursor, or similar agentic coding tools as a primary part of your workflow. You should be able to walk us through specific things you ve built or shipped using them.
• Agent Configuration: Practical experience writing CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md / equivalent files, custom commands, and sub-agent setups 6 and a clear view on what makes them effective.
• MCP (Model Context Protocol): Working knowledge of MCP 6 connecting agents to internal tools, data sources, or services. Bonus points if you ve built your own MCP server.
• API Design: Designing and managing scalable, secure APIs.
• Automated Testing: Strong testing instincts, especially important when reviewing AI-generated code.
• Database Management: Solid grasp of MySQL/relational and NoSQL databases.
• Communication: Strong English (B2+) and the ability to explain AI-augmented workflows to people who haven t used them yet.

Desirable Skills

• Building MCP servers or other agent tooling from scratch.
• Prompt engineering depth 6 eval harnesses, prompt versioning, structured outputs, tool-use design.
• LLM application development 6 not just using AI to write code, but building features that incorporate LLMs.
• Azure 6 our cloud platform.
• CI/CD and DevOps 6 Azure DevOps, Docker, AKS, infrastructure-as-code.
• Building services from scratch end-to-end.
• Frontend awareness 6 React or similar.